Category Archives: LinkedIn Advice

The ‘People Also Viewed’ section is an area that has great potential value to people looking at your profile page. However, unlike most other parts of your profile, this is one that you don’t directly control in terms of the information it provides.

More annoyingly, the value it provides isn’t reflected back to you, but rather benefits the person looking or indeed the people who appear in this list. Not good!

Just to be clear, the section I’m talking about is the column on the right hand side of your profile page which displays a series of profile links. (more…)

You may have noted that LinkedIn seems to have succumbed to an attack of the measles … green measles to be precise. For some they arrived last year only to disappear for a while, but then returned last week once again and are now back with a vengeance. For others, you may be seeing them for the first time and wondering what they signify.

Don’t worry, they’re not contagious. However, they do potentially offer us some valuable focus for our interactions on LinkedIn – so let’s get to the nitty gritty of what they are all about!

What do they mean?

This is part of the LinkedIn system that is called the ‘Active Status’ indicator and quite simply it shows when your connections are actually logged into the site and, to a certain point, also when they were last active.

A lot of people I speak to about LinkedIn, particularly those who don’t spend all of their time online or glued to their phone, tell me they feel a little uncomfortable when they first go onto the site.

Why is this?

From what I can tell, it’s because they don’t know the rules … and we like to know the rules. Deep down the majority of us like to fit in and we feel comfortable when we do. We can reveal bits about ourselves at our own pace … and that pace will differ between individuals.

What do you do on LinkedIn?

Is it rude not to accept an invitation? What happens when I press “that” button? Do they know if I disconnect from them? Do they really know when I look at their profile? Do I have to read all the motivational quotes on my homepage?

If we don’t know how we should act then that’s not so good and we don’t want to offend. So what we do is … nothing.

To help, I try to equate LinkedIn with something they are more comfortable with and so I use the analogy that LinkedIn is simply (more…)

Well, as the phrase goes, you either love them or hate them but one thing that you’ll find it difficult to do is simply miss notifications on LinkedIn … and that’s probably a good thing, given what they are trying to achieve. 🙂

As with so many things on LinkedIn, the issue arises because people want to use the site in different ways and so something which one person finds of value, another might consider to be a waste of time or better suited to a site like Facebook. And so it is with LinkedIn Notifications. So the challenge we face is how to get the best out of them and to avoid the annoyance that people feel that they are in some way irrelevant and intrusive.

Luckily, and again like so much on LinkedIn, you can customise this section allowing you to see the ones that you are interested in and hide those that for you are simply irrelevant noise.

So what are Notifications?

Notifications do very much what they say on the tin – they simply notify you when something which is deemed of interest or importance to you happens. You’ll find them in the main menu and they appear for a number of very different reasons.

There’s been a slow drip feed of information since August when LinkedIn announced that they would be making big changes to the interface and it has subsequently turned out, some equally large changes to aspects of the functioning of the site.

Probably.

I say probably because even those with the beta version of this new interface have been experiencing a developing system with multiple changes since it arrived some 4 weeks ago, and no doubt will continue to do so as the process develops.

What we can be sure of is that we do need to be prepared and to make sure that we have our data secured so that we are prepared for whatever awaits.

These are 6 actions, I would therefore encourage you to take:

1) Back up your Profile

The format of the profile (and certain content elements of it too) is changing with the new interface so it’s a good time to make a back up to make sure that you retain all of the information that you have put in there. (more…)

This is the second part of a 2 post series looking at some key housekeeping tasks that I’d recommend on LinkedIn – things that we might consider to be in the “New Year Resolution” category but which I believe some be a continual process throughout the year.

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